The problem is that people buying K parts and building PCs around them are pc enthusiasts.
Is my gaming desktop going to do double duty as a production Xen server? Of -course- not. At least not at the same time.
But if I look around my home office, the cpu's that used to be in my gaming PCs... one is in a Xen server that I'm using actively. And another is a vmware server.
But as I use both xen and vmware for work, having these 'toy' servers at home has been helpful for learning, and experimenting. I definitely want cpus that support these technologies. I expect I'll build a hyper-V unit sooner than later too.
The only question i have about intel's move is "why" is this some sort of misguided marketing nonsense, or do these features perhaps interfere with the overclockability of the K cpus. Maybe transactional memory and hardware virtualization don't over clock well ? If that' the case... I get it.
Otherwise, I'm completely stumped as to why intel is removing it.
I'm pretty sure you can be charged with something like that in most jurisdictions.
But in the 'incident' cited by the OP the drunk driver was 'taken away in cuffs' so its improbable he was seriously injured, and obviously not killed.
While the cops can and do have discretion to charge drivers at an accident with moving violations, and even criminal charges if the circumstances of the accident warrant it.
If their is evidence the driver was doing 150mph, and witnesses observed he was street racing with another vehicle,... then yeah... expect some pretty serious criminal charges headed his way. But if there's nothing but a couple banged up cars at a busy intersection? Most car accidents are accidents. And while the driver or drivers are usually in some way at fault / responsible its not usually "criminally so". (Nor should it be IMO.)
. We had an incident in town where everyone who saw the wreck was pointing at one person as being at fault, but the guy who got hit was drunk. Guess who got cuffs?
Being responsible for an accident is not criminal. It happens. It would be a bit of a stretch to arrest the average person responsible for wreck to prison. Most of them are guilty of a combination of traffic violations (speeding, failing to yield right of way, failing to signal, following too closely, failing to observe a traffic sign, etc, etc... ), bad judgement and bad luck.
They usually aren't criminals.
Driving drunk is properly illegal. Not "moving violation" illegal, but criminally illegal.
An analogy to the incident you relate would be one where the neighbors wife, irate at the loud party next door, summons the police, who notice a stolen car in the callers side yard and end up hauling her husband away. Its the same sort of thing, the incident that precipitated the sequence of events was not the stolen car. The police are only present as a result of the noise complaint... but at the scene, an unrelated but more serious crime is discovered.
The noise is a city bylaw infraction and its the reason the police are there, but the stolen car is grand theft auto. Guess who goes away in cuffs.
"In this case, the person causing the accident may get some leniancy by pointing out that the person was driving illegally and could have avoided the accident had he not been."
Depends on the accident, getting rear ended and a bunch of witnesses pointing at the sober guy who hit him is still probably going to be found at fault.
And the drunk driver is still going to be charged with a DUI.
A more ambiguous case... might flip over the guy facing the DUI... but really, in that case they sober party just got lucky they hit a drunk, and the guy with the DUI has much bigger things to worry about than a moving violation he just got unfairly saddled with.
I'll leave out the "defense against tyranny" argument for you.
You had better. Because that isn't the subject. You complained specifically that the publication of this information made you more vulnerable to burglary. And that is the only point I am refuting.
I don't disagree with the defense against tyranny to the -same- extent (although I do find it fallible in its own right) but it is beside the point. Nor am I generally disagreeing with any of your rights to have a firearm, not at all.
I am ONLY disagreeing with your argument that it makes you more vulnerable to burglary.
Think about it like this [...]
Firstly, retail prices and fenced prices of used stolen goods are worlds apart and are pretty much at their lowest point on the end of the crook selling to a fence.
I could fit 30 boxes in a single backpack with ease, meaning this bag is now worth $900
Sure, new at retail... and 15 ps3 games at $60 each is $900. Better weight / value ratio; that won't fill the backpack.
So if I were a criminal, I could case a place for 3 days, find out if they work a regular 9-5. Break in during the day, use a $150 drill and $50 drill bit to open a gun safe in 1 hour, and make off with a $5,400 pay day (minus $200 in expenses for equipment).
You've just profiled a pretty smart pretty organized criminal. He has a plan. Casing the place. Bringing tools to break into a safe. And always carrying the risk he'll run into an armed homeowner. All to steal $5400 worth of stuff that is relatively "hot" (difficult to unload to anyone legitimate). Not to mention a product that the police are relatively interested in retrieving compared to say someone's Xbox 360 and games. And if they do get caught with a stash of stolen "assault rifles" that's going to be worse for them too.
The recovery rate on firearms is relatively high compared to most other items. Due in part to registration and other controls, and in part because its higher priority to investigate in the first place.
This criminal isn't a methhead looking for a smash and grab for his next fix. He's at least a bit of a thinker.
So why would this so-called smart criminal bother with small firearms capers? Why not high end road and mountain bikes. Those go for $5000+ too at least list price new and are a LOT easier to unload etc. Or break into a store and steal high value density items. Anything from cigarettes to cellphone chargers, small power tools to monster hdmi cables.
I know of many instances where criminals have stolen guns out of people's houses and attempted to sell them. Happened to a friend of mine last year. It does happen.
No question that it happens. Criminals attempt to steal and sell absolutely anything they can get their hands on.
But the trouble with your scenario of dramatically increased risk to yourself is it presumes criminals smart enough to do something else, something more profitable and less risky.
Finally, suppose there were a criminal actually interested in the enterprise of profiling gun owners casing them out, and stealing their guns 2 or 3 at a time. He still has plenty of options even if there is no "national gun registry". Facebook, twitter, gun clubs, forums would provide him all the targets he'll ever need.
And just like savvy car stereo thieves have friends or contacts in the car stereo sales / installation business. This gun-thief would have friends working at local gun ranges, and gun shops. Etc. So he'd have an inside track on who just bought some big expensive X or other, or who had a big collection of Zs.
So if that guy were to exist, then he already exists, and he doesn't need a gun registry to help him.
I rather expect that most short-term reversals are due to tragedies, not plans.
Agreed. Or the marriage falls apart and your new partner wants to have kids too. I wasn't suggesting that situations for relatively short reversals don't ever arise.
I was only suggesting that it would be a very strange route to deliberately plan to take.
Its not to be treated as "birth control" -- it should be viewed as permanent "sterilization". That it can be reversed with a considerably more complicated and expensive surgery than the original vasectomy, with moderate success, some of the time really shouldn't enter into the decision making process to have one. Yes its possible, no you don't plan around that.
. I do have a problem with the government publishing how many firearms I have in my house because that puts me and my neighbors at risk of home burglary or getting into the situation where I need to defend myself with said firearms.
Sorry to derail the thread a bit, but this is truly delusional.
Why is it only the people WITH firearms are up in arms that "criminals might know that you have guns"?
The people without firearms are the ones who are relatively defenseless if they get robbed. But they aren't complaining. They aren't worried about it. Why aren't they worried?
But you, the one with a bunch of guns, is worried? Why are you worried? You have a house full of guns, and presumably know how to use them. Why exactly would you be at increased risk of burglary? Particularly relative to those who don't have firearms?
Why would criminals target you if they knew you had guns? Because they want to dramatically increase their odds of getting shot? Because they crave the adrenalin rush of a shootout?
Or is it because they want your guns? Why wouldn't they just rob softer targets and use the cash to buy guns? They could buy them legally, or even black market... its not like the black market for guns is primarily supplied by robbing random firearms from gun owners one or two at a time. You do know all this right?
But if Sony made a patch to make the console match the XBox One, it would affect 100% of their customers. Every. Single. Gamer! That would be a huge PR nightmare.
Only if they applied it retroactively.
A more likely scenario would be that Sony will take the long term approach and just wait for the PS5 to implement the same restrictive system.
Why wait that long? It would be no big deal to retire the existing sku and launch a new one with the patch baked in. And then every PS4 from that point on has it.
That's precisely how they "removed" backwards compatibility from the PS3 after all.
And while they might not actually force the issue retroactively they might throw all kinds of carrots at people to lure them into accepting an 'optional' update that adds the restrictions.
Or they might just restructure it slightly to make it slightly less mandatory for early adopters. E.g. the "first generation" units will have the patch retroactively forced on them, they'll check in daily if they can, automatically apply updates, delete anything on the system that is unauthorized, etc, etc. But first gen units won't outright stop working if they go 24hrs without a connection.
BPAS cites the average pregnancy success rate of a vasectomy reversal is around 55% if performed within 10 years, and drops to 25% if performed over 10 years
From the same article:
BPAS cites the average pregnancy success rate of a vasectomy reversal is around 55% if performed within 10 years, and drops to 25% if performed over 10 years.
95% successful at producing some viable sperm, but if its been >10 years only 25% effective at producing offspring.
And its most successful reversal rate is within 3 years, which, quite frankly, why bother with surgery you plan to reverse in 3 years?!
And ~that~ combined is what makes it impractical as effective male birth control. In an ideal world you get get one at 15 and then reliably reverse it at 25-30 when you want kids. But by that point you are well into 75% of it not working well enough to get anyone pregnant territory.
Its great once you are -done- having children, but if you plan to have children in the future... not so much.
if sued the limited libabillity company goes under and nothing happens to you. use the corporate contorted legal system to your own advantage
Why would they sue the company? The company has a paid account. They'd sue you, personally, the individual using their service who does not have an account.
But even so, it raises some interesting points:
Can a corporation have a netflix account? If not, why not? Is that discriminatory? After all, "Corporations are people too my frienda".
If they can have an account who is allowed to stream content on their behalf, employees? shareholders? officers?
Maybe I should incoporate for steam. Now the account holder (the corporation) never dies, and presumably my wife can play my games without violating their EULA; solves at least one of the larger gripes I have with Steam...
Sorry Haselton, as others have pointed out the whole question is SUPERFAIL.
The so called fail3 criteria in particular is completely ridiculous.
"the alleged "benefits" of the Fifth Amendment apply equally to the innocent and guilty, or disproportionately favor the guilty."
Why is that even a criteria? The entire justice system is predicated on an adversarial system that is supposed to uphold presumption of innocence, forcing the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the guilty party is in fact guilty. Many of our protections "disproportionately favor the guilty". They invariably keep the guilty from ever being caught, while they generally only inconvenience an innocent who presumably would be exonerated in due time - since you've implied that we must assume competency of the courts with your 5th point.
Consider requiring a warrant for a non-destructive search, that "favors" the guilty. The truly innocent are just inconvenienced by a non-destructive search but the guilty would get caught with contraband, direct evidence of criminal activities and so on. Meanwhile the time to get a warrant may afford the guilty an opportunity to destroy or dispose of the very evidence incriminating him. Surely we should get rid of the requirement for search warrants because they disproportionately favor the guilty.
Haselton, using the same criteria you set out for the 5th amendment defense, explain why we should require search warrants for non-destructive searches. Remember all your exhortations that we cannot consider overzealous or corrupt police still apply and any example citing such can be discarded because we would assume the same corrupt police would have simply lied and said that you had consented to the search. You also can't call out that the property of innocents would be destroyed because I've already limited the scenario to "non-destructive searches". (such as rifling through your pockets, opening your glove box, the trunk of your car, looking under your seats, checking your closet, opening drawers, etc.) We can also discount any arguments that the police would use indiscriminate powers of search to harass the innocent, because harassment of course is itself illegal.
Create some relatively small but interesting (to you) application. Being able to build a small application with a properly normalized database will put you head and shoulders above most people that call themselves DBA (especially the sql server crowd).
That's an orthogonal skill set.
SQL admin skills are more about backup management, security, replication, clustering, performance, access controls, disaster recovery, performance monitoring, resource management...
You can be a fantastic schema designer and query writer and have virtually no clue about any of the above.
To you it might be the correct thing to do, to me it is uncalled for
It is in the same category as making a point of pulling over latinos to check for immigration status. I think its uncalled for, and should be classed as illegal racial profiling.
But it is still correct that doing so will find far more illegals than pulling over people at random. There are millions of latino illegals. There are fewer illegals of other races. Singling out latinos will find more illegals.
how can you with a straight face say that what the IRS did was right when even the IRS says what they did was wrong?
I didn't say it was the right thing to do. While going after "Tea Party" applications makes sense, they should have recognized the political bias was unacceptable and at least attempted to balance that out by deliberately targeting liberal and other politically charged keywords... whatever those might be.
so just because a group has the word "patriot" in it, it means that they are trying to break the law? If people truly believe that its a damn shame.
No. It (correctly) means there is a higher probability that the group has a political objective. It (correctly) means that the group may be attempting to register as a non-profit organization for political objectives using a type of non-profit orgranization entity that is not intended for political objectives.
The ONLY thing the IRS did wrong was include keywords that selectively target conservative applications with this profiling. And honestly, the only keyword that seems especially conservative profiling is "tea party". Not all that many PACs use the word patriot, and some of them are liberal.
And lets face it... if they wanted to go after liberal PAC's what words would even make the cut? "Tea Party" is just REALLY low hanging fruit. Any SuperPAC caling itself Tea Party anything is pretty much announcing its political nature... unless anyone things there's a lot of earl gray and orange pekoe clubs out there all suddenly registering for tax exempt status.
The existing face unlock handles those fine as long as you do additional captures.
And in the real world? Crashed on a mountainbike the other day and had to call the mountain crew for an extraction. Ooops I forgot to do an additional capture with a bad facial cut and blood and sand/gravel embedded on my face. Phone doesn't recognize me. (Yes full face helmet was on... and very likely saved the face, teeth, jaw... but you can still scrape and cut up your face a bit.)
And if all else fails, there's the pattern/pin/password backup lock it requires you to have.
Which I won't have committed to memory since I haven't used it since purchasing the phone 11 months ago and setting up facial recognition.
I don't know the code to access my voicemail either, because i haven't manually dialed into my voicemail from "not my phone" in a zillion years either.
On the upside, presumably facial recognition phones will have a tough time in the dark and other rare scenarios like darkness that it will fail often enough that I'll need to use the pin code often enough to keep it in memory. But then, if it fails half the time... why bother using it at all. Any time or convenience gained by using it when it works is lost by trying it when it doesn't work. And lets be honest here... making faces at your phone to unlock it is rarely going to be more "convenient" anyway.
For the shuttle story, I provided the only citation I can
That's too bad, as it's an interesting story. But it could just as easily be 'urban legend' as fact. Even just confirmation that Russians rotated their craft 180 would be supporting evidence.
As for Samsung, a lot of it was obvious after the fact.
So much of what the iphone did becomes obvious as soon as you start with the presumption of a touchscreen (and one using fingers, not a stylus at that).
A lot of details from the form factor -- small tablet with rounded corners, to many of the UI details simply follow from that.
And even much of what Apple did had already been done on low profile devices by more obscure manufacturers on more limited devices or in labs.
They do get credit for pulling in all that previous touch UI research and building a pretty seamless product, but its overstating the case that they had all kinds of uniquely 'deep' understanding of what they were doing.
Apple's "true genius" IMO was really just to recognize that the key technology (multi-touch screen) was -ready- for prime time and then bet the farm that consumers wanted it and put it out in a high profile product launch.
I disagree. The value you get with this method is absolutely worthless because you have no idea how your workload differs from a "typical" workload or how your handling differs from "reasonable" handling.
Its not worthless because you can tell a lot of about the relative performance of different models. If your usage is 30% worse on one then it will likely be 30% worse accross them all and you can still use the ratings to make valid comparisons.
Lower an upper bounds on how long a charge lasts at least have a well defined meaning.
Not really. Because, to use a car analogy again, the upper bound of performance is not standard. Something like a Porsche or Ferrari or Bugatti is orders of magnitude beyond a Ford Fiesta.
You max out a Veyron and the tires last 10 minutes. Fortunately the car will run out of gas in 7 minutes.
The Porsche will go 45 minutes, and the tires might last the day driving like that.
You floor a Ford Fiesta and you can still drive for a few hours before it runs out of gas, and the tires will have plenty of wear left on them.
But this is totally worthless information to make any sort of valid comparison.
Acers free thumb drive will be factored into 1q2014 quarterly profit and expenditures accordingly. it will be reflected in the price of the $next_Acer_laptop
So not only do they get a free thumbdrive, but competitors laptops will be cheaper for the same thing since the cost of those drives has been added to acers new units, which I wasn't planning on purchasing anyway having been burned by them last time?
So... how is that not a win for me?
tl;dr: at no point does your class action windfall guarantee companies wont try to fuck you in the future in pursuit of the same greed that landed them in court the first time
Of course.
its most ethical to not participate in class action skull duggery and simply act as a responsible consumer.
It makes even more sense to take your class action freebie, and then refuse to do business with them in the future.
. Put differently, they'll copy elements without demonstrating that they have an understanding of why those elements are that way. In contrast, Apple outright stole Braun's/Rams' designs by owning them, in that they demonstrated a clear understanding of why the form of the design was the way it was and then modified it appropriately to suit their different needs.
That's a pretty bad case of rampant fanboism you seem to have there.:)
I'm reminded of a story I heard from an astronaut friend about the Russians once asking some visiting NASA engineers why NASA's space shuttle rotates 180 after launch...
Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, I'm genuinely curious. I find "cargo cult" behavior interesting in all its forms.
However, I don't think much of what Samsung replicated from the iphone was anything other than blindingly obvious. To assert that "only Apple" understood these things is comical.
Especially while Apple's skeuomorphic fetish has been a real turn off, showing that they, perhaps above all others, literally just aped things. Really, while some of it is arguably good and some arguably bad the 'bits of paper' left behind in ical are truly beyond the pale.
Okay, so the vast majority of Windows' target audience is end-users, yes? What some smug l33t folks call noobs or PEBKACs or ID10T errors, yes?
I'm sorry. I thought we were addressing YOUR complaints. The one's that were causing YOU, a/. poster and presumably some sort of power user to lose 20% of his productivity to Windows 8.
NOW you are saying your real concern is for lowest demomination end users? They don't spend significant time in the charms bar. They don't care that there's an extra step to logout. And if they were the sort of person to hunt around for the applications they wanted in the start menu, then the start screen is actually easier for them to use.
Now that said, I agree wholeheartedly that Windows 8 lacks some visual cues. Pretty much everything you would need is presented to you if you actually watch the 'welcome tour' when it first installs or starts up, but if you skip it, or sit down in front of Windows 8 without that tour then its absolutely more than a bit unintuitive what to do.
If you read my post history on windows 8 I have consistently disparaged hot corners, especially hot corners that are the only gui to reach functionality.
Windows 8 on the desktop has some UI defects, no question, but its hardly the debacle your making it out to be. A few minutes of orientation and an openness to the idea that being different from Windows 95 is not automatically horribly wrong and you'll find windows 8 perfectly usable. Not perfect. But really not significantly different from 7.
After you tweak the pinned apps on the start menu, turn off the distracting animated tiles, setup a toolbars, and tell it to run the desktop versions of apps by default, you'll rarely even see 'metro'.
requiring signing up to a MS online account to find and play the games in 8 that are ready-to-go in 7, and the removal of the DVD playback and the DVD Maker software that's in 7.
a) if solitaire is one of the biggest complaints about 8 I can live with that.
b) dvd playback... meh... i understand the complaint and its legitimate, I also understand why its not there. (lots of people don't use it, lots of devices are shipping without optical drives at all... and unlike other things its an actual licensing cost to MS that is being passed on to users.
c) dvd maker -- your kidding right?:) if that's the 4th largest complaint about windows 8 then its got nothing to worry about.:)
the lack of visual cues -- in particular "hot corners" coupled with a few poorly thought out defaults is really all that's wrong with win8. A little orientation, and some minor settings adjustment takes care of it.
"That idiotic right-hand-hidden toolbar thing, whatever they call it, frequently takes several attempts before it popped up. "
Win-C
"It's ridiculous to have to go into "settings" to shut down the goddamn computer."
You don't have to. Click the desktop background, press Alt-F4. You can also shutdown from the taskmanager, or you can logoff from the start screen and shutdown from the login screen.
"The "search" pane that I have to use to launch programs I don't want pinned to the taskbar (which is how I know what's actually RUNNING) sucks. "
The "search" pane you have to use to launch programs is actually better than the old start menu if you are actually searching for things.
For a few frequently used apps that you want in a little popup off of the start menu? Make a toolbar.
"The little "Device" management panel is a nightmare."
I don't even know what you are talking about, and with that in mind I'm skeptical that you actually need to spend a measurable amount of time in it.
when their braindead UI leads to a 20% loss of productivity because the stupid tablet interface gets in my way far more than it assists me.
5 minutes learning about the operating system you are using ought to restore that productivity.
The current situation is better. If you buy a $100 prepaid, the minutes last a year; even if you don't touch the phone. If you are a super light user / emergency user $100 year isn't too bad. Works out to around $8/month. If you aren't using more than $100 in minutes a year you only even have to think about it once a year.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that people buying K parts and building PCs around them are pc enthusiasts.
Is my gaming desktop going to do double duty as a production Xen server? Of -course- not. At least not at the same time.
But if I look around my home office, the cpu's that used to be in my gaming PCs ... one is in a Xen server that I'm using actively. And another is a vmware server.
But as I use both xen and vmware for work, having these 'toy' servers at home has been helpful for learning, and experimenting. I definitely want cpus that support these technologies. I expect I'll build a hyper-V unit sooner than later too.
The only question i have about intel's move is "why" is this some sort of misguided marketing nonsense, or do these features perhaps interfere with the overclockability of the K cpus. Maybe transactional memory and hardware virtualization don't over clock well ? If that' the case... I get it.
Otherwise, I'm completely stumped as to why intel is removing it.
except that is only true if intelligence is a purely straight line going from dumb to genius, which it is not.
Or any curve with half the area on each side of the midpoint.
So, it would be true if intelligence were a bell curve too, which it is generally considered to be the case.
there isn't a number 1 most average person, but a large group of people that would all fit in the group.
Yes, but no matter what test you devise, there will be a median, and half the people will be below it.
The people above and below that level are going to be much less than ~50%.
Have you seen a bell curve? Yes, the majority of the population is within a standard deviation of the midpoint, but half of them are still below it.
Parroting a saying without understanding I'd guess puts you in that group.
Where does that put you?
I'm pretty sure you can be charged with something like that in most jurisdictions.
But in the 'incident' cited by the OP the drunk driver was 'taken away in cuffs' so its improbable he was seriously injured, and obviously not killed.
While the cops can and do have discretion to charge drivers at an accident with moving violations, and even criminal charges if the circumstances of the accident warrant it.
If their is evidence the driver was doing 150mph, and witnesses observed he was street racing with another vehicle, ... then yeah... expect some pretty serious criminal charges headed his way. But if there's nothing but a couple banged up cars at a busy intersection? Most car accidents are accidents. And while the driver or drivers are usually in some way at fault / responsible its not usually "criminally so". (Nor should it be IMO.)
. We had an incident in town where everyone who saw the wreck was pointing at one person as being at fault, but the guy who got hit was drunk. Guess who got cuffs?
Being responsible for an accident is not criminal. It happens. It would be a bit of a stretch to arrest the average person responsible for wreck to prison. Most of them are guilty of a combination of traffic violations (speeding, failing to yield right of way, failing to signal, following too closely, failing to observe a traffic sign, etc, etc... ), bad judgement and bad luck.
They usually aren't criminals.
Driving drunk is properly illegal. Not "moving violation" illegal, but criminally illegal.
An analogy to the incident you relate would be one where the neighbors wife, irate at the loud party next door, summons the police, who notice a stolen car in the callers side yard and end up hauling her husband away. Its the same sort of thing, the incident that precipitated the sequence of events was not the stolen car. The police are only present as a result of the noise complaint... but at the scene, an unrelated but more serious crime is discovered.
The noise is a city bylaw infraction and its the reason the police are there, but the stolen car is grand theft auto. Guess who goes away in cuffs.
"In this case, the person causing the accident may get some leniancy by pointing out that the person was driving illegally and could have avoided the accident had he not been."
Depends on the accident, getting rear ended and a bunch of witnesses pointing at the sober guy who hit him is still probably going to be found at fault.
And the drunk driver is still going to be charged with a DUI.
A more ambiguous case ... might flip over the guy facing the DUI... but really, in that case they sober party just got lucky they hit a drunk, and the guy with the DUI has much bigger things to worry about than a moving violation he just got unfairly saddled with.
I'll leave out the "defense against tyranny" argument for you.
You had better. Because that isn't the subject. You complained specifically that the publication of this information made you more vulnerable to burglary. And that is the only point I am refuting.
I don't disagree with the defense against tyranny to the -same- extent (although I do find it fallible in its own right) but it is beside the point. Nor am I generally disagreeing with any of your rights to have a firearm, not at all.
I am ONLY disagreeing with your argument that it makes you more vulnerable to burglary.
Think about it like this [...]
Firstly, retail prices and fenced prices of used stolen goods are worlds apart and are pretty much at their lowest point on the end of the crook selling to a fence.
I could fit 30 boxes in a single backpack with ease, meaning this bag is now worth $900
Sure, new at retail... and 15 ps3 games at $60 each is $900. Better weight / value ratio; that won't fill the backpack.
So if I were a criminal, I could case a place for 3 days, find out if they work a regular 9-5. Break in during the day, use a $150 drill and $50 drill bit to open a gun safe in 1 hour, and make off with a $5,400 pay day (minus $200 in expenses for equipment).
You've just profiled a pretty smart pretty organized criminal. He has a plan. Casing the place. Bringing tools to break into a safe. And always carrying the risk he'll run into an armed homeowner. All to steal $5400 worth of stuff that is relatively "hot" (difficult to unload to anyone legitimate). Not to mention a product that the police are relatively interested in retrieving compared to say someone's Xbox 360 and games. And if they do get caught with a stash of stolen "assault rifles" that's going to be worse for them too.
The recovery rate on firearms is relatively high compared to most other items. Due in part to registration and other controls, and in part because its higher priority to investigate in the first place.
This criminal isn't a methhead looking for a smash and grab for his next fix. He's at least a bit of a thinker.
So why would this so-called smart criminal bother with small firearms capers? Why not high end road and mountain bikes. Those go for $5000+ too at least list price new and are a LOT easier to unload etc. Or break into a store and steal high value density items. Anything from cigarettes to cellphone chargers, small power tools to monster hdmi cables.
I know of many instances where criminals have stolen guns out of people's houses and attempted to sell them. Happened to a friend of mine last year. It does happen.
No question that it happens. Criminals attempt to steal and sell absolutely anything they can get their hands on.
But the trouble with your scenario of dramatically increased risk to yourself is it presumes criminals smart enough to do something else, something more profitable and less risky.
Finally, suppose there were a criminal actually interested in the enterprise of profiling gun owners casing them out, and stealing their guns 2 or 3 at a time. He still has plenty of options even if there is no "national gun registry". Facebook, twitter, gun clubs, forums would provide him all the targets he'll ever need.
And just like savvy car stereo thieves have friends or contacts in the car stereo sales / installation business. This gun-thief would have friends working at local gun ranges, and gun shops. Etc. So he'd have an inside track on who just bought some big expensive X or other, or who had a big collection of Zs.
So if that guy were to exist, then he already exists, and he doesn't need a gun registry to help him.
I rather expect that most short-term reversals are due to tragedies, not plans.
Agreed. Or the marriage falls apart and your new partner wants to have kids too. I wasn't suggesting that situations for relatively short reversals don't ever arise.
I was only suggesting that it would be a very strange route to deliberately plan to take.
Its not to be treated as "birth control" -- it should be viewed as permanent "sterilization". That it can be reversed with a considerably more complicated and expensive surgery than the original vasectomy, with moderate success, some of the time really shouldn't enter into the decision making process to have one. Yes its possible, no you don't plan around that.
. I do have a problem with the government publishing how many firearms I have in my house because that puts me and my neighbors at risk of home burglary or getting into the situation where I need to defend myself with said firearms.
Sorry to derail the thread a bit, but this is truly delusional.
Why is it only the people WITH firearms are up in arms that "criminals might know that you have guns"?
The people without firearms are the ones who are relatively defenseless if they get robbed. But they aren't complaining. They aren't worried about it. Why aren't they worried?
But you, the one with a bunch of guns, is worried? Why are you worried? You have a house full of guns, and presumably know how to use them. Why exactly would you be at increased risk of burglary? Particularly relative to those who don't have firearms?
Why would criminals target you if they knew you had guns? Because they want to dramatically increase their odds of getting shot? Because they crave the adrenalin rush of a shootout?
Or is it because they want your guns? Why wouldn't they just rob softer targets and use the cash to buy guns? They could buy them legally, or even black market... its not like the black market for guns is primarily supplied by robbing random firearms from gun owners one or two at a time. You do know all this right?
So what exactly is your fear predicated on here?
But if Sony made a patch to make the console match the XBox One, it would affect 100% of their customers. Every. Single. Gamer! That would be a huge PR nightmare.
Only if they applied it retroactively.
A more likely scenario would be that Sony will take the long term approach and just wait for the PS5 to implement the same restrictive system.
Why wait that long? It would be no big deal to retire the existing sku and launch a new one with the patch baked in. And then every PS4 from that point on has it.
That's precisely how they "removed" backwards compatibility from the PS3 after all.
And while they might not actually force the issue retroactively they might throw all kinds of carrots at people to lure them into accepting an 'optional' update that adds the restrictions.
Or they might just restructure it slightly to make it slightly less mandatory for early adopters. E.g. the "first generation" units will have the patch retroactively forced on them, they'll check in daily if they can, automatically apply updates, delete anything on the system that is unauthorized, etc, etc. But first gen units won't outright stop working if they go 24hrs without a connection.
No. That's true of trademark, not copyright.
What they did affected quite a few non-consenting individuals. Troll fail.
BPAS cites the average pregnancy success rate of a vasectomy reversal is around 55% if performed within 10 years, and drops to 25% if performed over 10 years
From the same article:
BPAS cites the average pregnancy success rate of a vasectomy reversal is around 55% if performed within 10 years, and drops to 25% if performed over 10 years.
95% successful at producing some viable sperm, but if its been >10 years only 25% effective at producing offspring.
And its most successful reversal rate is within 3 years, which, quite frankly, why bother with surgery you plan to reverse in 3 years?!
And ~that~ combined is what makes it impractical as effective male birth control. In an ideal world you get get one at 15 and then reliably reverse it at 25-30 when you want kids. But by that point you are well into 75% of it not working well enough to get anyone pregnant territory.
Its great once you are -done- having children, but if you plan to have children in the future... not so much.
if sued the limited libabillity company goes under and nothing happens to you. use the corporate contorted legal system to your own advantage
Why would they sue the company? The company has a paid account. They'd sue you, personally, the individual using their service who does not have an account.
But even so, it raises some interesting points:
Can a corporation have a netflix account?
If not, why not? Is that discriminatory? After all, "Corporations are people too my frienda".
If they can have an account who is allowed to stream content on their behalf, employees? shareholders? officers?
Maybe I should incoporate for steam. Now the account holder (the corporation) never dies, and presumably my wife can play my games without violating their EULA; solves at least one of the larger gripes I have with Steam...
Sorry Haselton, as others have pointed out the whole question is SUPERFAIL.
The so called fail3 criteria in particular is completely ridiculous.
"the alleged "benefits" of the Fifth Amendment apply equally to the innocent and guilty, or disproportionately favor the guilty."
Why is that even a criteria? The entire justice system is predicated on an adversarial system that is supposed to uphold presumption of innocence, forcing the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the guilty party is in fact guilty. Many of our protections "disproportionately favor the guilty". They invariably keep the guilty from ever being caught, while they generally only inconvenience an innocent who presumably would be exonerated in due time - since you've implied that we must assume competency of the courts with your 5th point.
Consider requiring a warrant for a non-destructive search, that "favors" the guilty. The truly innocent are just inconvenienced by a non-destructive search but the guilty would get caught with contraband, direct evidence of criminal activities and so on. Meanwhile the time to get a warrant may afford the guilty an opportunity to destroy or dispose of the very evidence incriminating him. Surely we should get rid of the requirement for search warrants because they disproportionately favor the guilty.
Haselton, using the same criteria you set out for the 5th amendment defense, explain why we should require search warrants for non-destructive searches. Remember all your exhortations that we cannot consider overzealous or corrupt police still apply and any example citing such can be discarded because we would assume the same corrupt police would have simply lied and said that you had consented to the search. You also can't call out that the property of innocents would be destroyed because I've already limited the scenario to "non-destructive searches". (such as rifling through your pockets, opening your glove box, the trunk of your car, looking under your seats, checking your closet, opening drawers, etc.) We can also discount any arguments that the police would use indiscriminate powers of search to harass the innocent, because harassment of course is itself illegal.
Looking forward to your response.
Create some relatively small but interesting (to you) application. Being able to build a small application with a properly normalized database will put you head and shoulders above most people that call themselves DBA (especially the sql server crowd).
That's an orthogonal skill set.
SQL admin skills are more about backup management, security, replication, clustering, performance, access controls, disaster recovery, performance monitoring, resource management ...
You can be a fantastic schema designer and query writer and have virtually no clue about any of the above.
To you it might be the correct thing to do, to me it is uncalled for
It is in the same category as making a point of pulling over latinos to check for immigration status. I think its uncalled for, and should be classed as illegal racial profiling.
But it is still correct that doing so will find far more illegals than pulling over people at random. There are millions of latino illegals. There are fewer illegals of other races. Singling out latinos will find more illegals.
how can you with a straight face say that what the IRS did was right when even the IRS says what they did was wrong?
I didn't say it was the right thing to do. While going after "Tea Party" applications makes sense, they should have recognized the political bias was unacceptable and at least attempted to balance that out by deliberately targeting liberal and other politically charged keywords... whatever those might be.
so just because a group has the word "patriot" in it, it means that they are trying to break the law? If people truly believe that its a damn shame.
No. It (correctly) means there is a higher probability that the group has a political objective. It (correctly) means that the group may be attempting to register as a non-profit organization for political objectives using a type of non-profit orgranization entity that is not intended for political objectives.
The ONLY thing the IRS did wrong was include keywords that selectively target conservative applications with this profiling. And honestly, the only keyword that seems especially conservative profiling is "tea party". Not all that many PACs use the word patriot, and some of them are liberal.
And lets face it... if they wanted to go after liberal PAC's what words would even make the cut? "Tea Party" is just REALLY low hanging fruit. Any SuperPAC caling itself Tea Party anything is pretty much announcing its political nature... unless anyone things there's a lot of earl gray and orange pekoe clubs out there all suddenly registering for tax exempt status.
The existing face unlock handles those fine as long as you do additional captures.
And in the real world? Crashed on a mountainbike the other day and had to call the mountain crew for an extraction. Ooops I forgot to do an additional capture with a bad facial cut and blood and sand/gravel embedded on my face. Phone doesn't recognize me. (Yes full face helmet was on... and very likely saved the face, teeth, jaw... but you can still scrape and cut up your face a bit.)
And if all else fails, there's the pattern/pin/password backup lock it requires you to have.
Which I won't have committed to memory since I haven't used it since purchasing the phone 11 months ago and setting up facial recognition.
I don't know the code to access my voicemail either, because i haven't manually dialed into my voicemail from "not my phone" in a zillion years either.
On the upside, presumably facial recognition phones will have a tough time in the dark and other rare scenarios like darkness that it will fail often enough that I'll need to use the pin code often enough to keep it in memory. But then, if it fails half the time ... why bother using it at all. Any time or convenience gained by using it when it works is lost by trying it when it doesn't work. And lets be honest here... making faces at your phone to unlock it is rarely going to be more "convenient" anyway.
For the shuttle story, I provided the only citation I can
That's too bad, as it's an interesting story. But it could just as easily be 'urban legend' as fact. Even just confirmation that Russians rotated their craft 180 would be supporting evidence.
As for Samsung, a lot of it was obvious after the fact.
So much of what the iphone did becomes obvious as soon as you start with the presumption of a touchscreen (and one using fingers, not a stylus at that).
A lot of details from the form factor -- small tablet with rounded corners, to many of the UI details simply follow from that.
And even much of what Apple did had already been done on low profile devices by more obscure manufacturers on more limited devices or in labs.
They do get credit for pulling in all that previous touch UI research and building a pretty seamless product, but its overstating the case that they had all kinds of uniquely 'deep' understanding of what they were doing.
Apple's "true genius" IMO was really just to recognize that the key technology (multi-touch screen) was -ready- for prime time and then bet the farm that consumers wanted it and put it out in a high profile product launch.
I disagree. The value you get with this method is absolutely worthless because you have no idea how your workload differs from a "typical" workload or how your handling differs from "reasonable" handling.
Its not worthless because you can tell a lot of about the relative performance of different models. If your usage is 30% worse on one then it will likely be 30% worse accross them all and you can still use the ratings to make valid comparisons.
Lower an upper bounds on how long a charge lasts at least have a well defined meaning.
Not really. Because, to use a car analogy again, the upper bound of performance is not standard. Something like a Porsche or Ferrari or Bugatti is orders of magnitude beyond a Ford Fiesta.
You max out a Veyron and the tires last 10 minutes. Fortunately the car will run out of gas in 7 minutes.
The Porsche will go 45 minutes, and the tires might last the day driving like that.
You floor a Ford Fiesta and you can still drive for a few hours before it runs out of gas, and the tires will have plenty of wear left on them.
But this is totally worthless information to make any sort of valid comparison.
Acers free thumb drive will be factored into 1q2014 quarterly profit and expenditures accordingly. it will be reflected in the price of the $next_Acer_laptop
So not only do they get a free thumbdrive, but competitors laptops will be cheaper for the same thing since the cost of those drives has been added to acers new units, which I wasn't planning on purchasing anyway having been burned by them last time?
So... how is that not a win for me?
tl;dr: at no point does your class action windfall guarantee companies wont try to fuck you in the future in pursuit of the same greed that landed them in court the first time
Of course.
its most ethical to not participate in class action skull duggery and simply act as a responsible consumer.
It makes even more sense to take your class action freebie, and then refuse to do business with them in the future.
. Put differently, they'll copy elements without demonstrating that they have an understanding of why those elements are that way. In contrast, Apple outright stole Braun's/Rams' designs by owning them, in that they demonstrated a clear understanding of why the form of the design was the way it was and then modified it appropriately to suit their different needs.
That's a pretty bad case of rampant fanboism you seem to have there. :)
I'm reminded of a story I heard from an astronaut friend about the Russians once asking some visiting NASA engineers why NASA's space shuttle rotates 180 after launch...
Do you have a source for that? I'm not denying it, I'm genuinely curious. I find "cargo cult" behavior interesting in all its forms.
However, I don't think much of what Samsung replicated from the iphone was anything other than blindingly obvious. To assert that "only Apple" understood these things is comical.
Especially while Apple's skeuomorphic fetish has been a real turn off, showing that they, perhaps above all others, literally just aped things. Really, while some of it is arguably good and some arguably bad the 'bits of paper' left behind in ical are truly beyond the pale.
Okay, so the vast majority of Windows' target audience is end-users, yes? What some smug l33t folks call noobs or PEBKACs or ID10T errors, yes?
I'm sorry. I thought we were addressing YOUR complaints. The one's that were causing YOU, a /. poster and presumably some sort of power user to lose 20% of his productivity to Windows 8.
NOW you are saying your real concern is for lowest demomination end users? They don't spend significant time in the charms bar. They don't care that there's an extra step to logout. And if they were the sort of person to hunt around for the applications they wanted in the start menu, then the start screen is actually easier for them to use.
Now that said, I agree wholeheartedly that Windows 8 lacks some visual cues. Pretty much everything you would need is presented to you if you actually watch the 'welcome tour' when it first installs or starts up, but if you skip it, or sit down in front of Windows 8 without that tour then its absolutely more than a bit unintuitive what to do.
If you read my post history on windows 8 I have consistently disparaged hot corners, especially hot corners that are the only gui to reach functionality.
Windows 8 on the desktop has some UI defects, no question, but its hardly the debacle your making it out to be. A few minutes of orientation and an openness to the idea that being different from Windows 95 is not automatically horribly wrong and you'll find windows 8 perfectly usable. Not perfect. But really not significantly different from 7.
After you tweak the pinned apps on the start menu, turn off the distracting animated tiles, setup a toolbars, and tell it to run the desktop versions of apps by default, you'll rarely even see 'metro'.
requiring signing up to a MS online account to find and play the games in 8 that are ready-to-go in 7, and the removal of the DVD playback and the DVD Maker software that's in 7.
a) if solitaire is one of the biggest complaints about 8 I can live with that.
b) dvd playback ... meh... i understand the complaint and its legitimate, I also understand why its not there. (lots of people don't use it, lots of devices are shipping without optical drives at all... and unlike other things its an actual licensing cost to MS that is being passed on to users.
c) dvd maker -- your kidding right? :) if that's the 4th largest complaint about windows 8 then its got nothing to worry about. :)
the lack of visual cues -- in particular "hot corners" coupled with a few poorly thought out defaults is really all that's wrong with win8. A little orientation, and some minor settings adjustment takes care of it.
"That idiotic right-hand-hidden toolbar thing, whatever they call it, frequently takes several attempts before it popped up. "
Win-C
"It's ridiculous to have to go into "settings" to shut down the goddamn computer."
You don't have to. Click the desktop background, press Alt-F4. You can also shutdown from the taskmanager, or you can logoff from the start screen and shutdown from the login screen.
"The "search" pane that I have to use to launch programs I don't want pinned to the taskbar (which is how I know what's actually RUNNING) sucks. "
The "search" pane you have to use to launch programs is actually better than the old start menu if you are actually searching for things.
For a few frequently used apps that you want in a little popup off of the start menu? Make a toolbar.
"The little "Device" management panel is a nightmare."
I don't even know what you are talking about, and with that in mind I'm skeptical that you actually need to spend a measurable amount of time in it.
when their braindead UI leads to a 20% loss of productivity because the stupid tablet interface gets in my way far more than it assists me.
5 minutes learning about the operating system you are using ought to restore that productivity.
The current situation is better. If you buy a $100 prepaid, the minutes last a year; even if you don't touch the phone. If you are a super light user / emergency user $100 year isn't too bad. Works out to around $8/month. If you aren't using more than $100 in minutes a year you only even have to think about it once a year.
If it is a 911 emergency, you don't even need an active subscription, just a working phone that can pick up signals from the tower.
Yeah, but grandma's "emergecy phone" is as much for "I got a flat tire" or "my car won't start" as it is for "I've fallen and broken my hip".
We don't want grandma calling 911 when she gets a flat tire.